Should I be installing TabMon, TabJolt, and/or LogShark on my production boxes? My Tableau rep says it is fine, but at conference some other people seemed to think that there might be some issues with running these on your production server.

I'm not sure if there is a definitive right or wrong. For us, we consider it best practice to have tabjolt and tabmon installed on non-Tableau boxes as we don't want it's own internal processes to skew the load of Tableau Server. And we do not use LogShark currently.

Running those utilities are going to consume resources. Those resources will not be able to be used by Tableau Server if being used by the utilities which may (more than likely will) cause your metrics to be skewed. Highly suggest you install on a separate box.

Definitely not TabJolt and LogShark - these utilize a fair amount of CPU when running.

TabMon? It depends on how often you're sampling data, how many metrics you're capturing, and where you are storing the data (to a local PostgreSQL or a remote database). It'll add some overhead, but you could easily modify the config file of TabMon to and tell it to monitor ITSELF as it records data about Tableau processes on the machine. That way you could make an informed choice.

I've heard people discussing this subject before, but I've never seen anyone present meaningful data to help inform the choice...so everyone's opinion (including mine) is equally (in?)valid